For me, visiting Italy is a bittersweet experience. The sweetness comes from knowing that virtually everything I taste — from the morning’s first expertly pulled espresso to the sip of limoncello in the trattoria at evening’s end — will be intensely memorable. The bitterness comes later, usually when the plane has left Leonardo da Vinci airport and I’m confronting the minor insult of the in-flight meal, and the tiny tragedy of my first sip of reheated filter coffee. By then it’s already too late: Once again, I’ve left Rome behind, and the sprezzatura has started to drain from my day.

It’s a maddening hallmark of the culture. Italians, who are extraordinarily good at elevating simple tastes and textures into the realm of the extraordinary, will also go to great efforts to make the whole process look effortless. Five hundred years ago, the humanist author Baldassare Castiglione labeled such studied nonchalance “sprezzatura,” from the verb meaning “to undervalue.” “We may call that art true art,” he wrote in “The Book of the Courtier,” “which does not seem to be art.” For a gracious nobleman in Renaissance Urbino, that meant being able to finish dancing the most elaborate saltarello with a double hop and a self-deprecatory shrug.

In Rome, I am fooled by sprezzatura all the time, especially when it comes to food. When I tried my first rectangle of pizza bianca, salted flatbread slathered with olive oil, at a bakery in Campo de’ Fiori, it seemed like the most uncomplicated of snacks; in reality, it keeps its characteristic texture, crispy outside and chewy inside, for only a few minutes after being pulled from an overachieving industrial oven.

The first time I wandered into the gelateria around the corner from the Trevi Fountain, the flavors on offer seemed pretty basic — no cookie dough or cherries jubilee in sight — until I learned that the owners of San Crispino made their limone with handpicked lemons from the Amalfi Coast, and the basil gelato with leaves left to ferment for six months.

At the Sant’Eustachio caffè, near the Pantheon, every espresso is topped with an improbably thick layer of chestnut-hued foam; a plastic flap alongside the nozzles on the machine prevents customers from glimpsing how much sugar the baristas add to the crema (a case of sprezzatura turned into proprietary secret). In Italy, you should never underestimate the amount of finesse brought to bear on the most elemental of pleasures.

On this trip, I decided not to leave Rome without trying to pick up a few bravura techniques of my own. Learning to cook a few Italian staples there would be the surest way to develop my own sense of sprezzatura. So this summer, I rented an apartment with a basic but functional kitchen in the Trastevere neighborhood, close to some of Rome’s best markets. Surely I would be able to master a contorno — a seasonal vegetable side dish — and a couple of Roman pasta staples. I vowed to start with the simplest of all: cacio e pepe, a dish said to attain perfection through the use of only three ingredients: pasta, cheese and pepper.

Knowing where to start, though, is harder than it looks, especially with cacio e pepe, a dish whose trendiness has recently led to a proliferation of recipes. Last year, President Obama was served a plate, along with a glass of 2006 Brunello, at a private dinner party at Villa Taverna, the American ambassador’s residence in Rome.

When an earthquake hit the Emilia-Romagna region three years ago, the three-star Michelin chef Massimo Bottura raised money for the region by offering a risotto of cacio e pepe that used wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano broken by the quake at his Modena restaurant, Osteria Francescana. Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario Batali have published cacio e pepe recipes that call for Parmesan (and in Mario Batali’s case, butter).

For true Roman cooks, this is an abomination: While there is room for debate about the pasta to be used, there can be none about the cheese. The cacio — an old dialect term for cheese — in question can only be salty, fatty pecorino Romano. A brine-washed ewe’s cheese aged for a minimum of eight months, it is also considered one of the oldest Italian cheeses: Pliny the Elder described its production in the Roman countryside two millenniums ago.

At Felice a Testaccio, a trattoria that has been open in Testaccio, a working-class neighborhood on the east bank of the Tiber River, since 1936, the bowl of unmixed cacio e pepe that is brought to the table at first looks as appetizing as an autopsy pan heaped with viscera.

Fat, slimy noodles of tonnarelli — a fresh, egg-based pasta that in Rome is acceptable as a deluxe alternative to spaghetti — are puddled with the soapy-looking water the pasta has cooked in. It is only the flick of the waiter’s wrist that makes them into something appetizing. With a spoon and a fork, he lifts the noodles from the bowl, at the same time giving them an energetic clockwise half turn. Every motion coats the pasta with the mound of finely grated pecorino, flaked with coarsely ground black pepper, that is hidden in the bottom of the bowl. The result is the cremina, a sauce whose unctuousness results not from butter or cream, but from the combination of the fat from the pecorino, the starch from the pasta and the residual heat of the cooking water. (This is also the way to make a real Roman Alfredo sauce, which consists of butter, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and fettuccine, but not a drop of cream.) It’s a privileged display of sprezzatura at work.

“This is the secret, how to do the perfect cacio e pepe,” said my lunch companion Laura Perez, as she watched the mixing process. (“I have the most photographed hands in Rome,” quipped the waiter when I asked if I could video him at work.) Born in the suburbs of Rome, Laura is a talented home chef who appeared on “La Prova del Cuoco,” a popular cooking show on the Rai television network. She told me that her grandmother, who was from the Lazio region outside Rome, was her first teacher.

“She was perfect, my grandmother,” Laura said. “From her, I learned to do everything all’occhio, by eye, just by watching what she did.”

To make cacio e pepe for two, Laura starts by bringing a pot filled two-thirds full with water to boil, adding sale grosso — enough kosher salt to fill the hollow in the palm of her cupped right hand — just when the first bubbles appear. (“Otherwise it becomes too salty.”) When you add the spaghetti or tonnarelli, she says, “test it as you cook, so it’s al dente; in Rome we don’t like pasta mushy.”

Using a slotted spoon, rather than a colander, she scoops the pasta on top of the pecorino and pepper mix. The cooking water comes last. “Usually it’s two spoons for a plate. Not three, because it becomes a soup — it’s not good.” For Laura, the combination of simple, high-quality ingredients makes this a classic Roman dish.

“Cacio e pepe is not the kind of pasta you can eat every day. Too many calories. Even when you are young, you have it maybe once a month.”

When I tested her recipe in the kitchen of my apartment, I got her point: After a few bites, my stomach revolted against the prospect of another caloric hit. It didn’t help that my first attempt came out a clumpy mess, an issue I resolved in later versions by stirring in extra virgin olive oil with the cheese and pepper. I’m already learning a key paradox: When it comes to cooking like a Roman, there may be no absolute truth, but there are well-defined limits.

My next instructor, so to speak, was Katie Parla, a popular food blogger and fellow contributor to The New York Times who moved to Rome from New Jersey 12 years ago. “In Italy,” Katie said as she navigated the stalls of an indoor food market near the Vatican, “there is no recipe, but there is, you know what I mean? And everybody will fight to the death to prove their recipe is the best recipe — even though their knowledge is usually based on rumor.”

Katie had offered to help me assemble the ingredients for an amatriciana sauce. A staple on Roman menus, it is most often eaten with the long, hollow noodles called bucatini (the word means “pierced”) whose unruliness on the fork means the tomato-based sauce cries out for a napkin to be tucked into the collar. I met Katie in the Prati neighborhood, outside the Mercato Trionfale, one of the indoor markets that have almost completely replaced Rome’s well-loved sidewalk markets.

“Campo de’ Fiori is one of the only outdoor markets left,” she told me, “but it’s also the saddest, because there are very few produce stalls, just a lot of bottles of limoncello and olive oil baking in the sun.”

The 200 vendors at Trionfale, she pointed out, are offered subsidized rent and have been given access to fresh running water. (Some of new indoor markets, like the airy complex in the Testaccio district, offer sit-down cafes and lunch stands, and have become destinations for visiting foodies.)

Efficiently steering her way through the older women who make up the bulk of the morning shoppers, Katie stopped at a stall where plastic crates were piled high with eggplant, cucumber, cantaloupe and zucchini. The white-gloved vendor handed her a paper bag full of fat, ripe cherry tomatoes, still on the vine.

“I love that smell,” she said, plunging her nose in the bag. “Summertime.” Tomatoes, it turns out, are one of the only things that Romans agree goes into an amatriciana sauce, though even their inclusion is disputed by culinary authorities.

“Amatriciana,” Katie said, “is a cured pork and tomato-based sauce that includes pecorino and sometimes onion and sometimes garlic and sometimes chile peppers and sometimes black pepper.” Its origins are traditionally traced to Amatrice, a sleepy provincial town in the Sabine Hills northeast of Rome. Food scholars believe the earliest versions predated the 18th-century popularization of tomatoes in Italy. A tomato-free “white amatriciana,” known as gricia, can still be found on Roman menus; its key ingredients, grated pecorino and guanciale (pork jowl that has been cured, though not smoked) also go into the traditional sauce.

After a vendor gave us two tiny red pepperoncini — similar to dried Thai bird’s-eye peppers — without charge, we left the market and walked two blocks to La Tradizione, a delicatessen that proved to be an Aladdin’s cave of Italian cheeses and cured meat.

A counterman in a white smock wrapped up a half-pound of guanciale, enough for three people, and selected a piece of pecorino from beneath a huge glass bell that can be lowered to keep some of the shop’s 400 kinds of cheese fresh. I was surprised when Katie handed me a package not of bucatini, but of a variety of dried pasta shaped like a truncated cylinder.

“It’s a bit controversial,” she admitted. “A very classic amatriciana would be rich and heavy, and made with bucatini. I prefer making mine a little lighter, and using these mezze maniche.” Key to her amatriciana, she said, is combining fresh tomatoes with passata, the uncooked tomato sauce, strained to remove seeds, available in grocery stores. Wishing me buona fortuna, she promised to email me a recipe, and headed off for the day’s appointments.

Before attempting my own amatriciana, I decide to sample the versions served at two of Rome’s best trattorias. At Flavio al Velavevodetto, in Testaccio, the sauce is rich and salty-sweet, but the chef, Flavio De Maio (who trained for seven years in the kitchen of Felice a Testaccio), opts to use rigatoni, which, when cooked in the Roman style, verges on the crunchy side of al dente.

I decided that the classic bucatini all’amatriciana served at Da Cesare al Casaletto, a trattoria on the lower floor of a residential building on the Janiculum Hill, would be the one I tried to emulate. Slurping up the wriggly bucatini, after all, is part of the dish’s sloppy charm. (Full disclosure: The owner of Da Cesare, Leonardo Vignoli, noticed my note-taking and came to my table to offer me a glass of Cirsium, by the Lazio-based vintner Damiano Ciolli, and the combination of the swirling tannins of the lightly oaked red and the sauce’s inherent saltiness elevated the experience to another plane.)

The next day, though, my own attempt at amatriciana, based on the directions that Katie had emailed me, resulted in an inedible mess of intolerable saltiness. I realized that following a recipe isn’t enough: I needed to work side by side with a genuine Roman cook.

I decided to call a group called Home Food, which offers cooking lessons and home-cooked meals to visitors. Founded by a sociology professor from the University of Bologna in 2004, the nonprofit group now organizes visits with 400 home cooks, known as Le Cesarine (or “Little Caesars”), whose goal is to keep traditional home-cooking techniques alive in an age of microwaves and takeout.

Flavia Pantaleo, the cesarina who welcomed me into her apartment east of Villa Borghese, showed me why my attempt at an amatriciana tasted like a mouthful of water from the Dead Sea. Because pecorino and cured pork are already salty enough, she said, it’s important to undersalt the water you cook the pasta in. (Flavia prefers to use dried pasta made by Libera Terra, a supermarket brand produced in regions that have been freed of Mafia influence; for her amatriciana, she surprised me by opting for pancetta, from the pig’s belly, rather than traditional guanciale from the jowl.)

After uncorking a bottle of Frascati, that crisp, young white wine of ancient pedigree that so perfectly accompanies the Roman summer, Flavia sets me to work on my last challenge: making stuffed, deep-fried zucchini flowers. As I cut a ball of mozzarella into rectangles, she explained that her mother, though baptized as a Catholic during the Fascist era, grew up in a Jewish household and taught her daughter some of the staples of Rome’s Jewish community, the oldest in continued existence in Europe. Fiori di zucca ripieni is one of the most spectacular: the male flowers of the squash plant, whose involutions call to mind the membranous ears of a bat, are stuffed with anchovies and cheese, then dipped in batter and deep fried. Served in pairs, wrapped in cones of wax paper, they remain the summer appetizer of choice in Rome’s Jewish ghetto.

Naturally, controversy attends the correct way of making them. Katie Parla prefers stuffing them with well-rinsed salted anchovies; Flavia thinks that anchovies packed in oil make for a less salty dish. Some cooks opt for ricotta, but Flavia prefers the texture of melted mozzarella; she recommends fior di latte over bufala. (Everybody agrees that removing the pistils, which are bitter, before cooking is essential.)

As I watched Flavia at work, I saw she did it all all’occhio, by eye, adding a spoonful here, a pinch there, never using exact measures. After combining flour, salt and white wine (“You can put in beer, too,” she says, “because it’s bubbly. If you have some leftover prosecco, that’s even better”), she left the batter to settle for a few minutes while filling a deep pan with peanut oil. As it heated on the stove, she threw in a few grains of salt, which, she told me, will keep the flowers from spitting as they fry in the hot oil.

As we sat at the dining room table, I marveled as I bit into the orange and green flowers, each one batter-bound and enfolding a nugget of anchovy and molten mozzarella, and sighed as I spooned up the last of the perfectly salted amatriciana sauce.

“Bonissimo, eh?” said Flavia, with quiet satisfaction.

Indeed. That evening, I witnessed the essence of finesse: Flavia elevated simple dishes into something remarkable, without recourse to measuring cups or cookbooks. In so doing, she’d given me a living demonstration of Castiglione’s true art, “that art which does not seem to be art,” one best learned through practice and imitation, rather than bookish study.

And this, I realize, is the most important lesson of all: To cook as they do in Rome — a place where they know the best recipe is no recipe at all — the only secret ingredient you really need is a pinch of your own sprezzatura.